Most Innovative Makers

The maker culture is a contemporary culture or subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture. Typical interests enjoyed by the maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of CNC tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and traditional arts and crafts. The subculture stresses new and unique applications of technologies, and encourages invention and prototyping. There is a strong focus on using and learning practical skills and applying them creatively.

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Caleb Harper is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Open Agriculture (OpenAG) Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He leads a diverse group of engineers, architects and scientists in the exploration and development of future food systems. Caleb’s research focuses in the areas of control environment design, actuated sensing, control automation and data-driven resource, energy and biologic optimization. His group, together with strategic partners, is developing an open-source agricultu...

New York, New York

Bre Pettis is an American entrepreneur, video blogger and multi-artist. He is also known for DIY video podcasts for MAKE, and for the History Hacker pilot on the History Channel. He is one of the founders of the Brooklyn-based hacker space NYC Resistor.
Pettis is a co-founder and the CEO of MakerBot Industries a company that produces 3D printers. Besides being a TV host and Video Podcast producer, he’s created new media for Etsy.com, hosted Make: Magazine’s Weekend Projects podcast, and ...

Singapore, Singapore

Andrew “bunnie” Huang is an American hacker, who holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from MIT and is the author of the 2003 book Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering. He was born in 1975. Huang is also a member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. As of 2012 he resides in Singapore.
Dr. Huang was the hardware lead at Chumby; his responsibilities included the design and production of chumby devices, as well as the strategic planning and ecosystem development of ...

San Francisco, California

I’m an Electrical Engineer developing open-source hacks, building robot armies, blogging+vlogging, and promoting sustainability and entrepreneurship.
Presently, I’m a Hardware Engineer at Google working on Google Glass.
I believe the line between art and technology is meant to be blurred, and that engineering can be both functional and beautiful. My passion is turning ideas into reality.
I recently wrote a book called Exploring Arduino.

San Francisco, California

Mitch Altman (born December 22, 1956) is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone, as a featured speaker at hacker conferences, as an international expert on the hackerspace movement, and for teaching introductory electronics workshops. He is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
Early life and education
Altman grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois. After kindergarten his family moved to Highland Park, Illinois. Altman graduated from...

Sydney, Australia

David L. Jones is an electronics design engineer based in Sydney Australia.
In this blog he shares some of his 20+ years experience in the electronics design industry in his unique non-scripted naturally overly enthusiastic and passionate style. Bullshit and political correctness don’t get a look-in.
Dave started out in hobby electronics over 30 years ago and since then has worked in such diverse areas as design engineering, production engineering, test engineering, electro-mechanical eng...

New York, New York

Becky Stern is an American artist based in New York City. Her work combines traditional crafts like embroidery, knitting & jewelry-making with physical computing technologies like Arduino.
Stern worked as Associate Editor for MAKE and CRAFT magazines and is a fellow with the online Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T.). She is currently Director of Wearable Electronics at NYC-based Adafruit Industries.
She holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Des...

New York, New York

Phillip is Senior Editor of MAKE Magazine. He has authored and contributed to numerous books on programming, mobile devices, design, hardware hacking and is also a contributing editor for Popular Science. In addition to MAKE, Phillip is Creative Director at Adafruit Industries, a New York City based open source hardware & electronic kit company. Prior to MAKE, Phillip was Director of Product Development for creative firm Fallon Worldwide, best known for their award-winning films.

New York, New York

Limor Fried is an American electrical engineer and owner of the electronics hobbyist company Adafruit Industries. She is influential in the open-source hardware community, having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and the drafting of the Open Source Hardware definition, and is known for her moniker ladyada, an homage to Lady Ada Lovelace.
Career and recognition
Fried studied at MIT, earning a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in 2003 and a Master of...

Turin, Italy

Liu Francisco, born in Macau in 1949, started his career in the Ferrero Group near Turin, Italy. In 1985 he founded the company Italchina, creating business connections between Italy and China. He is the founder and CEO of OSVehicle. While working, for more than 30 years, in the motorcycle and automotive business. Seven years ago he started the OSVehicle project, and three years later he and Ampelio Macchi decided to leave the corporate world and start a project of their own to change the way...

San Francisco, California

As founder of Make Magazine and Maker Faire, he has helped launch the Maker Movement.
Since 1984, he worked with Tim O’Reilly to create O’Reilly Media, writing some of their early books and then editing others, as they became a publisher of “Nutshell” handbooks.
He began looking for ways to move those books online, which led him to find the World Wide Web and participate in its early development (1991-1993). He organized the World Wide Web Wizards Workshop in July 19...

Paul Johnson has an international reputation for his pioneering work in developing literacy through the book arts. He is author of over fifteen titles including A Book of One’s Own, Literacy Through the Book Arts and Pictures and Words Together (all published by Heinemann,USA.) Recent teaching tours include Sweden, South Korea and Thailand and he regularly teaches in the USA.
Dr Johnson is also a successful book artist with work in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London, the Coop...

Fin is the creator of The Sentry/Project Assistant/ Robot Companion, or simply called SPARC. He is able to take voice commands via an Arduino using an EasyVR (voice recognition) shield. Commands include movement, arm control, and even querying of the internet through an integrated cellphone. The second Arduino processor is tasked with operating the motors and a sonar unit that enables object avoidance and limited following capability.

Joe Grand is an American electrical engineer, inventor, and hardware hacker, known in the hacker community as Kingpin. He achieved mainstream popularity after his appearance on Prototype This!, a Discovery Channel television show. He specializes in, “finding security flaws in hardware devices and educating engineers on how to increase the security of their designs”. Grand has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs regarding government and homeland compu...

Eric Pan, founder and CEO of Seeed Studio, grew up with DIY culture in China, challenged national-wide contests of MCU, Embedded Design, Robotics, and English skills, graduated as an EE bachelor from Chongqing University.
He first joined Intel as a chipsets product Engineer for quality control and new product integration.
He established Seeed Studio in 2008 from bare ground and now developing it into an open source hardware facilitator with 60+ employees.

Star Simpson is an engineer, Maker, and entrepreneur. She studied electrical engineering at MIT, created the TacoCopter, and co-created the Octopart PCB Reference Card. Star has written for Make: and presented at Maker Faire.

Steve Hobley works for a software company, but in his spare time likes to deconstruct all the lovely consumer goods with a goal to make unique and interesting things.
A few years ago he posted a short clip of the laser harp he had developed, solely to show his brother and a few other friends back in the UK. Automagically that one clip got picked up by Gizmodo, Engadget and a bunch of other tech journals. The end result (apart from a ton of views on Youtube) was to get hired as a consultant f...

Marc de Vinck was director of product development at MAKE magazine and a member of the MAKE Technical Advisory board. He has written numerous posts on do-it-yourself science and technology on makezine.com, as well as articles and featured builds in the print version of MAKE. He speaks at events across the country. De Vinck previously worked in fields as diverse as traditional metal smith, illustrator, and 3D model maker. He thrives on the process of making and educating, with one of his great...

Liam Casey is the Founder and CEO of PCH, which designs custom manufacturing solutions for Fortune 500 and startup companies. Since founding PCH in 1996, Casey has grown the company to over $900M in revenues in 2013. The company has been a huge advocate and supporter of startup hardware companies, such as LittleBits, Cue, Ringly, Drop, Navdy and Blaze, among many others.
Named after the famed California Highway, PCH is headquartered in Cork Ireland. PCH opened its USA headquarters in 2013 in ...

Matt Mets is a technically Director of Blinkinlabs, Matt is a maker who uses electronics to create playful objects that teach and inspire. An electrical engineer by training, he’s been at various times an RF engineer, embedded systems architect, writer, and exhibit designer. He currently lives in Guangzhou, where he enjoys fast access to the world’s largest electronics manufacturing base.

Kipp is the author of Distributed Network Data (Hardware Hacking for Data Scientists), with Alasdair Allan, and is one of the cofounders of the Data Sensing Lab. He is an advisor to Highway1, the leading hardware start-up accelerator, and founded the Innovation Institute, an NSF-funded project that teaches innovation to underserved youth in New York City. He is one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s “Nifty Fifty.” He was the Demo Chair of the 2013 Open Hardware Su...

Los Angeles, California

Mark Frauenfelder is the founding editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine, the founder of Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and the editor-in-chief of Cool-Tools.org. He was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998, the founding editor of Wired.com, and is the author of seven books. His latest book is “Maker Dad: Lunch Box Guitars, Anti-Gravity Jars and 22 Other Incredibly Cool Father-Daughter DIY Projects.”

Named to Wired Magazine’s Smart List, William Gurstelle is a bestselling author, DIY expert, and professional speaker. The author of Backyard Ballistics, Absinthe and Flamethrowers, and seven other books, he is recognized for his particular talent for making science and technology accessible, intriguing, and – most of all – fun to all readers and audiences. Having sold more nearly half a million books, he is one of the world’s most widely read authors on science and technology.
The c...

Los Angeles, California

He is a former character technical director and CG supervisor with Disney Animation Studios and Disneytoon Studios respectively, and currently a technology transfer producer with Disney Research, a husband, and a father of two. His obsessions include cocktails, coffee, robots, beatboxing, and training for American Ninja Warrior.
He writes about building contraptions, drinks, CG animation, and more.
He writes for Make: magazine and he was the host of the Make: television show on Public Televis...

Mr. Jalopy is a leader in the Maker movement and a contributing editor to Make.He and the movement he espouses are trying to reconnect users with their tools, to reassert creative control over technology that is so sophisticated it is opaque to its users. In pursuit of that goal he blogs about repairs and inventions, and he encourages manufacturers to make products that are easier for users to maintain, repair, and even repurpose.
He is described as “a hero to the Maker Movement.”...

Leah Buechley is a designer, engineer, and educator whose work explores intersections and juxtapositions—of “high” and “low” technologies, new and ancient materials, and masculine and feminine making traditions. She is a leading developer in the fields of electronic textiles and paper electronics. Her inventions include the LilyPad Arduino. From 2009-2014, she was a professor at the MIT Media Lab where she founded and directed the High-Low Tech group. She has bee...

Tim Anderson is the author of the “Heirloom Technology” column in Make Magazine. He is co-founder of www.zcorp.com, manufacturers of “3D Printer” output devices. His detailed drawings of traditional Pacific Island sailing canoes are at http://www.mit.edu/people/robot.
Tim’s philosophy involves building minimum-consumption personal infrastructure from recycled scavenged materials.
Redirecting the waste stream. Doing much with little. A reverse peace-corps to lear...

San Francisco, California

Technology consultant, artist, and author focused on creative and inventive use of technology and media. Experienced in video production, hardware and software development, interaction design, and fabrication.
He is a Product Evangelist for Raspberry Pi, handling outreach within the U.S. He is also a former Contributing Editor to Make.

Kate Hartman is an artist, technologist, and educator whose work spans the fields of physical computing, wearable electronics, and conceptual art. She is the co-creator of Botanicalls, a system that lets thirsty plants place phone calls for human help, and the Lilypad XBee, a sewable radio transceiver that allows your clothing to communicate. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured by the New York Times, BBC, CBC, NPR, in books such as “Fashionable Technology” and “Art ...

Eric J. Wilhelm is the founder of Instructables. He has a Ph.D. from MIT in Mechanical Engineering. Eric believes in making technology accessible through understanding, and strives to inspire others to learn as much as they can and share it with those around them.
In addition to his doctorate, Eric earned his SB, and SM degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, where he developed methods to print electronics and micro-electromechanical systems using nanoparticles. He co-founded Squid Labs,...

New York, New York

Tom Igoe is a Co-Founder of Arduino, an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. Tom joined the Arduino team in 2005 and it has fundamentally changed how hardware is made.

Jimmy DiResta is a New York-based designer, artist and video producer. He was born on April 3, 1967 in New York.
After his TV career he entered the Youtube media business, publishing on his own, the Make magazine and core77 channel. His personal brand is the name “DIRESTA” written with stenciled fonsts, most often sprayed on tools he removed the original brand before. Additionally he hosts the weekly “Making it” podcast since October 2014 together with David Picciuto ...

Charles Platt is the author of Make: Electronics, an introductory guide for all ages. He is completing a sequel, Make: More Electronics, and is the author of Volume One of the Encyclopedia of Electronic Components. Volumes Two and Three are in preparation.

She is a doctoral candidate in the Responsive Environments group, and before this in the High-Low Tech group, at the MIT Media Lab. She got her bachelors of science in mechanical engineering atColumbia University. She also worked in electronics design and fabrication at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, on the littleBits project.
She is focused on creating custom tools for paper electronics–blending paper craft with building electronics. In collaboration with bunnie, she created circuit s...

Lenore M. Edman is one of the two top lab coats behind Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. She used to live in Portland, Oregon where she commuted by bicycle with her kid riding along in a sidecar. Abandoning wet for warm, she moved to Austin, Texas, where she designed and sewed her own wedding dress. Later, as a regular of the Boulder, Colorado weekly cruiser bike ride, she overhauled a mid-century Hawthorne ladies bicycle (named Stella). Since moving to Sunnyvale, California, she has helped to...

Windell H. Oskay is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a Silicon Valley company that has designed and produced specialized electronics and robotics kits since 2007. Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories also runs a popular DIY project blog, and many of its projects have been featured at science and art museums and in Make, Wired, and Popular Science magazines. Windell was also a founding board member of OSHWA, the Open Source Hardware Association. Previously, Windell has worked as a...

JEREMY S. COOK is an engineer with 10 years of full-time profession, and has a BSME from Clemson University. Outside of work he’s an avid Maker and experimenter, building anything that comes into his mind!

Jay Silver is the Founder/CEO of JoyLabz/Makey Makey and was the first ever Maker Research Scientist at Intel. Jay’s MIT PhD topic was World as Construction Kit. He made many creative platforms such as Drawdio (Time’s Top 15 Toys for Young Geniuses) and Makey Makey (Kickstarted for $500,000, Pop Sci Best of ToyFair). Jay has been a speaker at many TED events, exhibited artwork internationally, and been named a Top 100 Inspirational World Changer by DELL. He sits on the board of di...

New York, New York

David co-founded AeroFarms out of a passionate commitment to the preservation and health of our water resources and has grown it into a force for environmental good the world over.
A serial entrepreneur, David is also the founder of Hycrete, Inc., a cleantech nanotechnology company, He is an active member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and a frequent participant in its annual meeting in Davos. Within WEF, he is honored as a Young Global Leader, where he co-chairs the Circular Economy Task...